You probably know what is said in the title already.Devs, thank you so much for having a trunk builds archive, but I have one somewhat tiny request.

Apparently, trunk builds started back somewhere around 0.5. I put the trunk builds archive link into Wayback Machine a while back, and it was a treasure trove of builds to explore! However, robots.txt decided to come one day and be very irritating. Now, no matter what I do to this day, I cannot get into the website through the Wayback Machine.

I really want to try some old trunk builds, just to see what the devs were thinking of back then, but the trusty Wayback Machine is not being very nice. It would be very nice if whoever runs the builds archive website could put everything on that website, not just current builds back to 0.14 builds. Also, I would like to play the old release candidates for the versions such as 0.6 that were released before the official versions were.

Besides, without every version released back to the very beginning (0.1), the "archive" isn't very complete, is it?

I would love to play both old versions of the game and old trunk builds.

By the way, I have never run a website for archived versions of a game before, so I absolutely no idea how difficult it really is to pull this off.

I hope there is some sort of a way to get every single version ever released onto that website.

If there are any alternatives that still would have a 100% complete archive if there is no way to make the website complete, please reply!Also, I don't know the reason for this archive being incomplete, so could anyone please inform me on this? Thank you!

Since the source code is public, you can compile your own versions, although the further back you go the harder it might be. Compiling Crawl 4.0b26 is relatively straight forward on modern systems, but I never tried early DCSS versions.

If you can't do what you want to do while respecting robots.txt, then you need to reconsider whatever you're trying to do. The robots.txt isn't there for no reason.

Claw wrote:I hope there is some sort of a way to get every single version ever released onto that website.

If there are any alternatives that still would have a 100% complete archive if there is no way to make the website complete, please reply!Also, I don't know the reason for this archive being incomplete, so could anyone please inform me on this?

Let's see. Each of those Windows setup executables is about 15 MB for the tiles version and 10 MB for the console version. Same for the zip files. So that's about 50 MB per version.DCSS has had 55,279 commits. Even if we assume that only 25,000 of these versions actually compile, that's still going to be about 1.25 TB of setup and zip files. While that would fit on my personal computer, I wouldn't want it sitting on my Web server when the files are practically useless anyway - why would anyone need an installer specifically for 0.16-a0-3212-g68818ff? It'd also take ages to generate the installers and zip files in the first place.

Thank you for clarifying. I didn't know some of the versions released wouldn't compile, and you're right about how long it would take for them to make installers for every version. But it would be much easier (and still be cool!) if they had an archive of every official release with installers. There were probably lots of bugs those old trunk versions, and probably lots of things that were broken. But the official releases are probably very playable, and very fun to check out.

Besides, why is there information on the Wiki with absolutely no use if we can not play the older official releases?

Thank you again for clarifying! I had not thought about how much space those files would take up, and how useless some of those files would be. But I hope there is some sort of way to make an archive for all of the official releases.

Claw wrote:Thank you for clarifying. I didn't know some of the versions released wouldn't compile, and you're right about how long it would take for them to make installers for every version. But it would be much easier (and still be cool!) if they had an archive of every official release with installers. There were probably lots of bugs those old trunk versions, and probably lots of things that were broken. But the official releases are probably very playable, and very fun to check out.

Every major version since 0.9 is already archived here, along with 0.5 and 0.6. If you consider 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.7, and 0.8 to be such glaring omissions, you can always compile them and make archives yourself. Most software projects don't maintain binaries for 5-year-old versions at all!

Claw wrote:Besides, why is there information on the Wiki with absolutely no use if we can not play the older official releases?

But you can! After cloning the git repository you can run:

Code:

git checkout stone_soup-0.1.7

then compile 0.1.7 and play it. Same goes for any other version, down to specific commits.Also, the chaosforge wiki is not official or affiliated with the devteam in any way. Most of the information on it is wrong.

The official releases for 0.16.1 and earlier are archived here, seems to be reasonably complete, I just tried downloading a 0.1 point release and the download worked.

I think the original request has been sufficiently addressed, but I'll just add that figuring out how to compile it yourself and use git to access arbitrary versions would be way, way, way more practical than the request itself. (If that archive didn't already exist I'd pretty much say the same thing, though of course we'd have been highly likely to accept volunteer effort to create it! Would probably also accept volunteers to move it off sourceforge. Edit: wrote this while duvessa was writing & I didn't realize we were also maintaining that archive on develz.org!)

Besides, why is there information on the Wiki with absolutely no use if we can not play the older official releases?

The wiki is also volunteer-run, but not official in any respect, so you'd have to ask people who edit the wiki. But I suspect that information is mostly there because people find it interesting, but also because the wiki format means it's easy enough to keep it around rather than just deleting it.